MAY 6, 2019 –
Since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinated by flight, fueled by three early impressions:
First, during my earliest school days, I’d look skyward whenever a North Central Airline Convair turbo-prop droned overhead—“NOR” in large black letters on the bottom of one silver wing and “CEN” on the underside of the other. I’d wonder . . . who’s aboard, where are they bound, and why?
Second, each year at Christmas our “Santa Claus” uncle would visit from New Jersey. He always flew. Only my parents met him on arrival, which was late at night. His departure, however, was invariably on New Year’s Day and part of a tradition that included my sisters and me: a fancy lunch at a restaurant across from the art museum, an all too long tour of said museum, then the short drive to Wold Chamberlain Field just south of Minneapolis.
There we’d accompany our uncle into the bustling, brick terminal. Behind the check-in counter was a panoramic aerial photograph of a Northwest Orient Airlines Boeing 707 in flight against the backdrop of Japan’s Mt. Fuji. I yearned to be aboard such a plane flying over such scenery.
We’d then say good-bye to our family “Santa Claus” and scamper up to the outside observation deck on the second floor of the terminal. In the crisp winter air, we enjoyed a perfect view of passengers mounting the mobile staircase and entering the plane. Our uncle always turned for a final wave. Soon the four prop-engines of the DC-6 were fired up one by one. The plane then taxied away and took off into the blue. How I wished that I could fly off to some exotic place like Japan or even . . . New Jersey!
Third, in early 1962 two doors down from our house lived the Roeckers. They owned a late model Cadillac, which, by the time I was a mere second grader caused me embarrassment given how my frugal parents were perfectly satisfied with a Buick as old as I and an ancient DeSoto as old as they. But then one day I learned that Mr. Roeckers had traded in the Cadillac for . . . an airplane!
A short time later Mr. Roeckers offered us rides in the four-seat, high-wing, tailwheel Piper PA-20 Pacer. We took off from a grass airstrip on the other side of our small town. Once aloft we flew west over Main Street and seconds later, over our neighborhood along the Mississippi. I remember looking down as we circled and seeing what was a veritable “toy town.” That view radically altered my young sense of the world: how small it was!
Today whenever I see a plane in the sky, I gaze at it with the same wonder I had as a kid . . . who’s aboard, where are they bound, and why? And I wonder too . . . when the passengers look down at our precious planet, do they think, “How small it is!”?
© 2019 Eric Nilsson
